How are we judging One D&D questions and answers?

Question

I am asking because I don't understand what has happened to When using the One D&D Playtest are you supposed to be using the 5e rules too?.

The question seems perfectly ok to me and I don't understand the downvotes or the closure reasoning.

It looks to me that we are just being precious about one DND questions ruining the site because they can't be properly answered yet.

In this case a comment said it was because the question was lazy and answerable within the first paragraph of the material, which explains downvotes but not closure.

What it doesn't explain is why an answer saying 'this is in the first paragraph' got downvoted into oblivion.

All One D&D questions I have seen so far (and I don't follow the tag so haven't checked them all) are just full of downvotes that don't seem to follow our usual standards.

Can anyone clarify what is going on?

Answer 1

I downvoted some of these because they expect a canonical answer to a question that is by design not supposed to have one.

I think some of these questions are missing the point of a playtest. This is playtest material that is changing the core rules. The playtest rules and the old rules aren’t supposed to fit together neatly. You’re supposed to take the rules we already have, and the new playtest rules, and mash them together as best you can, then provide feedback about what worked and what didn’t. There isn't supposed to be a canonical answer to how these rules interact. You’re supposed to figure out what you think the answer is supposed to be, then report back to Wizards of the Coast with what you found.

So when a question asks,

The playtest rules contradict the core rules, what do?

The answer is:

Pick a ruling, playtest it, write down how it worked out, report those findings to Wizards, and let them know you were initially confused by the contradiction and that it needs to be addressed in future playtest materials and the final product.

I downvoted some of these because they are trivial and lack research.

I recently asked, What did we learn during the D&D Next playtest that should inform how we approach the One D&D playtest?. In her answer, doppelgreener writes:

By far our primary issue was “read this text back to me” style questions: someone indicates new material and asks us to explain it. Crucially the question describes no actual problem understanding the text. Such a question is essentially just an invitation to copy+paste/rephrase the material. These questions are answered, frequently self-answered, exactly that way.

Two of the questions we've had so far were obviously this sort of question (the two that were self answered), and I could see on some of the others where someone would downvote for this reason.

As for answers, I actually upvoted most (but not all) of them. The voting pattern on one-dnd-playtest answers seems much less unusual to me than what we saw on the questions, so I don't feel there is much there that needs explaining.

Answer 2

What material it is about for the question is not specified

The question does not point to the document of the playtest that is asked about. If tomorrow the playtest gets a new document, is that included?! under the current wording, that is very ambiguous.

It is a read the book to me question

The question can be answered by just reading the document that forms the basis for it. In contrast to questions that stem from bad formating in a book or the information being on the wrong page, it is in the very first paragraph. Read the book to me questions are quite frowned upon on the stack.

There is no actual problem proposed!

A casual reader of the document should have found the paragraph. It is not in an arcane other document or misaligned from bad formatting or just not reference, it's right there.

It shows we have not learned anything from the DND-Next Playtest

@SeriousBri This meta about One-DnD question might explain some of it. The community doesn't want to encourage multiple questions about the new playtest that will likely be outdated in the next playtest release. This particularly one is low effort as is can be answered from the first paragraph of the playtest material. – linksassin ♦ 2 hours ago

Please read the question that a moderator commented you with.

Answer 3

This question is worthy of its downvotes

Others already explained this pretty well.

The answer is probably not

I don't think it is good practice that a vote on an answer depends on whether the person who wrote it is the same as the question's author or not. Here if it wasn't an auto-answer it wouldn't have been downvoted.

Answers should be downvoted when they are bad answers, not when they are good answers to bad questions.

Answer 4

There are questions that need to be answered

Let's remember the point of the site;

1. To build a Q&A index
2. To answer questions that people ask

The first part of the playtest has been released. There has been a lot of questions and debating arising from the rules. Questions I asked were made to answer real questions that real people are asking and debating.

"There's no canonical answer because it's just a playtest"

That doesn't matter for two massive reasons. Firstly, when the rule is released it will be canonical. We need to understand what the rule means now, during the playtest, instead of worry about it at launch. The second reason is because when designers receive feedback they need to understand how players understood the wording of the rule, and how they played with it.

That's the whole point of a playtest.

"The answer is obvious"

These are real questions being debated by real people. High rep, highly experienced users are asking these questions. People in online communities like 4chan or reddit are debating them - there are multiple opinions and viewpoints. It's really jarring when someone says "ugh it's so obvious" then posts something incorrect or was confused about the answer before they read the posted answer!

"We don't know what the rules will look like on release"

That's fine, these are questions for the playtest, not the final release.

"There's only one possible answer"

Is there? At least 3 have been proposed;

1. One D&D rules modify 5e rules wherever stated, but are otherwise the same.
2. One D&D rules are completely standalone
3. The playtest is incomplete and we fundamentally can't be answer questions about it

It only seems obvious in hindsight because you've read the answer and the reasoning behind it. This is something that people are confused about and are debating.

"The question is too simple"

We are fine with "Read Me The Book" kinds of questions elsewhere in the site, why are we only applying this to One D&D? There will be a lot of confusion around One D&D because it's new, it's exciting, it's unstable, it's less accessible than 5e. There will be more "simple" questions just because of that. Go back and look at any questions from a system a week old, they will be simple because people miss things and people misread and people get confused easily.

"You're just rep farming"

I have 1k rep, I'm happy to dump it as soon as I can. A mod can reset my rep. Downvoting everything I post because you don't want me to get rep is super lame. There are way easier ways to rep farm if that's what I cared about. I have tried to set my answers to community wiki to stop rep but this is an exploit apparently.

I will pledge now to dump my rep into bounties as soon as I can, ok? A mod can hold me accountable to that.

"I don't want to answer the question"

I don't agree with the concept of 'rep denial'. Sometimes you might feel as if you are competing with other people, but remember stacks are collaborative, not adversarial. If you leave a question you feel is too boring, too easy, not something interesting, or you don't have energy to answer, that's fine. Let someone else come and answer it. You can go answer a different question and get rep. Your 100k rep is no less impressive because someone else has 100k too.

We shouldn't moderate based on this doctrine of trying to prevent people earning rep. The focus should be building the archive and answering questions, rep was supposed to be a minigame, a side feature to show which users are active. It was not meant to be the primary goal of the site.

Back to basics

The point of the site is the Q&A index and to answer questions. Meta-site motivations like worrying about an answer becoming outdated within the next 2 years or the difficulty of the question or the rep of the asker are in direct contradiction to what our priorities should be.